


Midnight in the Garden

by isabel_archer



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 04:23:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3313799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isabel_archer/pseuds/isabel_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Petyr x Sansa ficlet that takes place sometime after chapter 42 of A FEAST FOR CROWS. Also my first piece of fanfiction EVER. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight in the Garden

Sansa had taken the book from the library on a whim. She had thought to distract herself, to while away another endless, empty evening. And she had liked how it looked—a binding of pale blue calfskin with the title, _THE BATTLE OF THE SEVEN STARS_ , embossed in gold. But the story inside her pretty book turned out to be ugly, telling of the bloody rout in which Artys Arryn, the Falcon Knight, had slaughtered an army of First Men to take possession of the Vale.

  
As Sansa turned the pages, she thought: I was right. There are no heroes; neither then nor now.

  
When she finally fell asleep, book still in hand, she dreamed that she was standing at the crest of a small hill. Above her, seven stars burned in a dawn-grey sky; below her, unspooling at her feet, a battlefield lay clotted with dead horses and men.

  
As she picked her way through the shin-high grass, she realized, with slow-dawning horror, that some of the dead were her own: there was her father, his head cut from his body, and there her lady mother, a slash like a scarlet ribbon crossing her throat. She saw Robb, Septa Mordane, Ser Dontos, King Robert, Joffrey, Lysa. Even Lady was there, her pale fur wet with blood.

  
Sansa jerked awake, her heart throbbing. Then—as she had many times since her arrival at the Gates of the Moon—she rose, wrapped herself in her warmest woolen shawl, and began to pace the halls, her candle guttering in drafts that seemed to blow in from other centuries rather than other rooms.

  
Her wanderings brought her, as they often did, to the gallery, a narrow, high-ceiling room full of oil paintings of long-dead lords and ladies, statues cast in bronze and marble, and a mouldering collection of tapestries. Sansa liked the tapestries best. They told stories, the old kind that she used to love: the maiden and the dragon prince, the white castle of Llyr, Sir Orfeo and his magic lute.

  
There was one tapestry in particular that she found herself lingering over. It was smaller and shabbier than the others, a bit tattered round the edges. It showed a garden set within four high stone walls.

  
This was not an extraordinary subject: walled gardens were common in the houses of Southron lords. Sansa remembered her mother’s descriptions of the garden at Riverrun: raked gravel paths winding through tidy rows of hyssop and iris, lavender and sweet lily. A circle of tall black birches. A teardrop-shaped pool filled with tiny gold fish. Sansa could picture the Riverrun garden exactly, all of it as bright and neat as Catelyn herself.

  
But _her_ garden (for Sansa had come to think of the tapestry garden in such possessive terms) was grown wild—grass high, ivy climbing the stone walls, roses tumbling everywhere, blood-red fading to brown at the edges.

  
Abandoned, Sansa thought. All of its people dead or gone away.

  
There were no pleasure gardens at Winterfell, walled or otherwise. Not in the land that remembered, even in the longest, hottest days of summer, that _winter is coming_.

Yet the tapestry reminded Sansa of Winterfell all the same. It was more the feeling of home than anything else; like a melody that she had heard long ago, now come back to her, at once familiar and strange.

  
“Beautiful, is it not?” said a low voice behind her.

  
Sansa turned, startled. The sudden movement extinguished her candle, but the moonlight slanting through the high windows brought into relief the sharp features of Lord Petyr Baelish.

  
“I do believe that this is my favorite out of the whole wretched lot,” he continued. “The Arryns are not known for their aesthetic sense. It’s one of life’s little ironies—the more gold a man has, the worse his taste.”

  
He was Petyr tonight, Sansa decided, studying the line of his mouth, the set of his jaw, the expression in his grey-green eyes. It was so hard to tell, these days. Petyr, Lord Baelish, Littlefinger. Which of them had taken her from the capital? Which had kissed her in the courtyard at the Eyrie? Which had pushed Lysa through the moon door? Sometimes she wondered if he knew himself.

  
He was still studying the tapestry. “There is something appealing about a good mystery, isn’t there?” He paused. “The other tapestries tell stories we’ve all heard a thousand times, at our nurse’s knee, in a minstrel’s song. But this one tells a story we can’t know.”

  
“Oh, but we can,” Sansa said. “We do. It tells the oldest story there is. See the rot just there, the blight touching the edge of the rose? The story is the words of House Stark: _winter is coming_.” She swallowed. “Death is coming.”

  
“But it is the way of things—” He checked. “Spring comes again. Life comes again.”

  
“If one survives the winter. But even then—”

  
“Even then?” he prompted.

  
“Even then—if one has lost everything—then nothing matters.”

  
“Some things could matter again.” He seemed hesitant, unsure of his own words. A rare thing, for any of his selves.

  
Sansa turned back to the tapestry, which was even stranger by moonlight than by candlelight, a shadow-version of itself. “It is beautiful, as you said.” She hesitated. “But it is so . . . sad. It hurts me to look at it. And yet I cannot stop looking at it.”

  
Petyr seemed to study her face for a moment. Then he looked away. “Perhaps it is beautiful because of its sorrow, not in spite of it.”

  
A sudden draft made her shiver. She wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

  
“You are cold, my lady. Please allow me to escort you back to your chambers.” Now it was Littlefinger speaking: calm, solicitous, controlled. Always controlled. “You really shouldn’t be wandering about the castle alone after dark.” Something like amusement flickered over his face. “You don’t know who you might meet.”

  
“I don’t want to go back to my chambers,” she heard herself say. “Please—will you walk with me in the gardens? A quarter of an hour, no more.” She paused, and added, “If you are not too busy, Lord Baelish. I know that your mind is much occupied at the moment.”

  
“Yes,” he said, absently. He was looking at the tapestry again. “But it would be sad indeed if I were too busy for a stroll in the gardens with so lovely a lady.” He offered her his arm.

  
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Sansa, as they crossed the threshold and emerged into the moon-bright garden.

  
His eyes moved over the path in front of them, searching the deep shadows cast by the hedge and the folded darkness at the turn. “Please forgive me,” he said. “I seem to have offended you somehow. I assure you, it was unconsciously done.”

  
“ _That_ offends me,” she answered, withdrawing her arm.

  
“I beg your pardon, my lady.” He raised his eyebrows. “I am not certain what you mean.”

  
“ _That_.” Sansa felt her face grow hot. Her fair skin made it hard to hide any strong emotion; anger and embarrassment turned her cheeks as red as her hair. Long ago her older brothers had liked to call her “Lady Tomato.” She had hated their teasing; but now, in this moment, she felt that she would give anything for Robb to yank on her braids or for Jon to come rushing at her with a toad in his hands.

  
Don’t think of them, she told herself. Now your hair is black, now your skin is steel, now your heart is grown cold as stone. You have seen men die, and women too. She took a deep breath and went on. “You play the gallant. I mean—I mean—you say things just to say them; as a kind of blind— _my lady_ this, and _please forgive_ me that.” She took another breath. “I hate it. I wish, just once, that you would . . .” She trailed off.

  
He was looking at her with a rare seriousness. The moonlight softened him. He looked, she thought, almost as he must have on that long-ago night when he had dueled with her Uncle Brandon. The night that he had nearly died for love of her mother.

  
And suddenly a deep and terrible pity twisted Sansa’s heart.

  
“You taste of lemons and summer wine,” Petyr said. “You taste of fresh clean snow and early strawberries.”

  
She looked away.

  
“I offend you with my empty courtesies,” he said softly. “And I offend you with the truth.”

  
He turned her chin so that they were looking at one another. “Tell me, Sansa,” he said, and the sound of her true name sent a shiver down her spine. “Tell me, what can I say?”

  
Her breath caught. His dressing gown had fallen open at the neck, and she could see a thin scar, white as moonlight, white as bone, curving out of it. As if of its own accord, her hand drifted to it, closer and closer, until her fingers brushed against it.

  
Sansa blinked, and felt hot tears roll down her face.

  
Petyr closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he said, in a strange, hoarse voice, “What’s this? Tears for me?”

  
“Tell me something true,” she said. “Tell me something real.”

  
He drew her in so that their foreheads were touching, and said, tenderly, “I did, I did. You taste of lemons and summer wine and fresh clean snow and early strawberries.”

“That sounds like a song,” she managed, with a sad little laugh. “You said—”

“I know what I said,” he murmured. He kissed her then, deeply, fervently, as if he were in truth the hopeful boy that the moonlight had made him seem.

He tasted of mint, and her own tears.


End file.
